Simulation study of a bottleneck-based dispatching policy for a maintenance workforce

Maintenance is important for production operations and for continuous improvement. Appropriate dispatching of the maintenance workforce to quickly respond to equipment failures and carry out preventive services can improve system productivity. The first-come-first-served policy is typically used in many manufacturing industries. In this paper, we present a priority-based dispatching policy, a dynamic bottleneck policy, based on the analysis of real-time data. In such a policy, priority is assigned to the bottleneck machine after a fixed time period, and the maintenance worker will service the high-priority machine (i.e. bottleneck machine) first when multiple service requests are received. It is shown by extensive simulation experiments that this policy can lead to a greater improvement in system throughput compared with the first-come-first-served policy. To implement such a policy, the appropriate time period for data collection and the frequency for carrying out bottleneck analysis are investigated. In addition, a sensitivity study suggests that the results obtained are insensitive to machine downtime, efficiency, and reliability models.